AI driven insights into your business!

It seems like pretty much everything can be ‘AI driven’ at the moment, including your business reporting.

PowerBI has some interesting AI/Machine Learning/Cognitive Services features which may be of interest, although as with most AI services they have their limitations and there’s still a need for a human expert to be doing the groundwork if it’s going to be effective.

Firstly, there are features which allow interaction with data using natural language, either for asking questions, or for generating insights. The Q&A service allows end-users to ask questions in natural language, such as “What was the average price of widgets in Q3 last year compared to this year”, or “What were our most profitable services by region over the last year”.

Then there are features which use Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services to add new functionality to reports, such as sentiment analysis. We could feed customer service data into the model, use sentiment analysis to identify positive or negative sentiment from the text (perhaps having converted speech from calls into text) and then report on the sentiment of incoming customer service enquiries to identify service issues early, or report on outbound messages from the customer service team to identify any areas of good practice, or where there is room for improvement.

All of these features require a solid data model. My view is that we’re still a long way from being able to dump a load of unstructured data from lots of different sources into a box and expect AI to just generate useful insights. In particular the natural language features often require some manual training on the language used in your business and in the data itself. For example, the Q&A service needs some training around the language and phrases used in your business day-to-day, so it understands that when someone asks “how many urgent jobs did we do last year” that ‘urgent jobs’ refers to service tickets which are categorised as priority one in the customer service system. It can also be helpful to users to provide them with some pre-populated example questions to help them get started.

If you’re interested in injecting a little AI into your business to drive better information and decision making, get in touch!